Christopher Hailey
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Christopher Hailey: Franz Schreker and The Pluralities of Modernism [Source: Tempo, January 2002, 2-7] Vienna's credentials as a cradle of modernism are too familiar to need rehearsing. Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Musil, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka conjure up a world at once iridescent and lowering, voluptuously self-indulgent and cooly analytical. Arnold Schoenberg has been accorded pride of place as Vienna's quintessential musical modernist who confronted the crisis of language and meaning by emancipating dissonance and, a decade later, installing a new serial order. It is a tidy narrative and one largely established in the years after the Second World War by a generation of students and disciples intent upon reasserting disrupted continuities. That such continuities never existed is beside the point; it was a useful and, for its time, productive revision of history because it was fueled by the excitement of discovery. Revision always entails excision, and over the decades it became increasingly obvious that this narrative of Viennese modernism was a gross simplification. The re-discovery of Mahler was the first bump in the road, and attempts to portray him as Schoenberg's John the Baptist were subverted by the enormous force of Mahler's own personality and a popularity which soon generated its own self-sustaining momentum. In recent years other voices have emerged that could not be accommodated into the narrative, including Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schmidt, Egon Wellesz, Karl Weigl, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and most vexing of all Franz Schreker. Long banished out of hand, Schreker was subsequently marginalized as a late Romantic and allotted a mini-orbit of his own. But a strange thing happened. With the experience of his music, music history - that history created by our ears - began to change. Received notions could no longer account for a simple and defining feature of Viennese modernism: its remarkable pluralism. Before 1914 Vienna was a cosmopolitan intersection of cultures and ideas, its music the reflection of that multicultural diversity that was the Hapsburg Empire's glory and its doom. After 1918 Austrians, shorn of their empire, sought to compensate their loss by a fatal identification with German culture. It was this crisis of identity that prompted Schoenberg's triumphant and defiant proclamation of a discovery that would assure Germany musical hegemony for the next hundred years; at about the same time another Austrian proclaimed a Reich ten times that span. Schoenberg's prophecy proved only marginally more accurate. Schoenberg's pronouncement was more than cultural opportunism. His conservative temperament, his outsider status - as an Austrian, a Jew, an autodidact, and a modernist - all reinforced his need for identification and it was an identification that sought its roots [above all] in history. Schoenberg claimed the legacy of Bach, the mantle of Brahms, and the revolution of Wagner, and [above all] the heritage of the Viennese classical tradition. As an historical concept, "Second Viennese School" hovers somewhere between an inspired marketing strategy and a bold coup d'Etat. It posits a dynasty where none existed and then usurps for itself the right of succession. The existence of either "school" is debatable, and neither can lay claim to being particularly "Viennese". On its face the concept is nakedly fraudulent and its fraudulence lies in its exclusivity, although one should hasten to add that the term itself (and the exclusivity it implies) was less Schoenberg's creation than that of his students and the generation of disciples that followed. Co-opting history was a pendant to Schoenberg's obsession with organic continuity. The breakthrough to atonality was justified as historical necessity, while the method of pitch organization purporting to tame these unleashed forces derived its authority from an abstraction of historical practice. To be sure, organicism such as one finds in Schoenberg's vaunted developing variation is present in certain works by Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms but it was Schoenberg who made it an article of faith, a moral category - and a cornerstone of Viennese tradition. To do this required ignoring other, equally characteristic aspects of Viennese and Austrian culture including the love of gaudy display, sensuous theatricality, lyric breadth, epic structure, and a fondness for the absurd, the inorganic, the unmediated, the very idea of disruption. Disruption was in fact a central category of the Viennese experience. As a microcosm and cultural crossroads of the Hapsburg Empire, Vienna was accustomed to juxtaposed incongruities, examples of which are evident in its art, literature, theater, and architecture over at least a millennium. In music this quality is demonstrably present in the works of its classical masters, as well in music by Gluck and Dittersdorf, Schubert and Bruckner, and others who fit less comfortably into the "classical" mold. The most significant challenge to Schoenberg's narrow definition of Viennese tradition lay still closer at hand: Gustav Mahler. Familiarity and relentless marketing have blunted our appreciation of Mahler's radical challenge. We forget how very shocking and, yes, tasteless, his music can be and we would do well to read with empathy the reviews of uncomprehending contemporary critics for they, far more than Mahler's acolytes, tell us why this music is still so vital and, if it is to remain so, how to recapture something of its affront. Evidence of that affront can be found in the difficulty it presented for Arnold Schoenberg, whose music is so very antithetical to that of Mahler. Schoenberg's music is centrifugal, it aspires to self-sufficiency, to a kind of hegemonic control; Mahler's music is centripetal; it makes no proclamations of cultural supremacy, but instead sends reports from the provinces. There is irony, even a tinge of betrayal in the fact that this ambitious outsider clawed his way into the center, to the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, where he ruled like a pope; he exercised powers Schoenberg could only envy. Mahler is a useful starting point for approaching Franz Schreker. Like Mahler, Schreker came from the periphery. He was born in Monaco in 1878, his father, a Bohemian©born Hungarian Jew converted to Protestantism, was an established portrait photographer accredited to numerous European courts. Schreker's mother, an Austrian Catholic, was the scion of minor nobility; her marriage to Ignaz Schrecker scandalized her family. The dissonance of his parentage, the itinerant life of his childhood (Monaco, Brussels, Spa, Paris, Pola, Linz), the early death of his father, the family's sudden impoverishment, and the death of a beloved sister, explain much about Schreker's aesthetic proclivity toward disjunction, reversal, and abrupt contrast. As an aurally and visually impressionable child Schreker came to consciousness in a series of widely disparate cultural, linguistic, and musical environments that defied seamless integration. Schreker was 10 when his newly-widowed mother moved with her four children to Vienna in 1888. Four years later Schreker entered the Vienna conservatory where his principle teachers were the violinist Arnold Rosé and the composer Robert Fuchs, who had also taught Mahler, Wolf, and Zemlinsky. Schreker graduated with distinction in 1900 but as he shed the thin Brahmsian veneer of his training what emerged was a seething concoction of influences at least as much Italian and French as German in origin. A first opera, Flammen (1901-1902), points the way to the breakthrough that came with his second, Der ferne Klang (c. 1903-1910). Der ferne Klang is a radical departure from Wagner, both in musical language and subject matter. Its stylistic and aesthetic multiplicity contrasts evocative Romanticism with seedy Naturalism, mystical symbolism with penetrating psychoanalytical insight. The juxtaposition of musical worlds, most notably in the opera's second act, suggests an aesthetic affinity with Mahler, although there is no evidence of direct influence. Indeed, Schreker had little early appreciation of Mahler's music and no love for Mahler as a cultural icon. There are occasional reminiscences - the Ländler that accompanies the Schmierenschauspieler's scene in the first act of Der ferne Klang has a certain Wunderhorn feeling - although they are fleeting and may even be instances of ironic allusion. But as with Mahler there is an unmistakable compositional identity behind Schreker's stylistic multiplicity. His orchestration, harmonic language, motivic design, and structural organization are uniquely his own and owe little to Brahms or Wagner, or to that synthesis of the two that we hear in the early works of Zemlinsky and Schoenberg. One is tempted to posit the influence of French Impressionism but aside from Charpentier's Louise the composer knew little contemporary French music at this time. Schreker seems to emerge from nowhere with a wholly idiosyncratic musical language, whose originality lies less in a fusion of impulses than in a daring montage of often clearly identifiable sources. It is a creative phenomenon that recalls not only Mahler but Hector Berlioz, another voice from the periphery whose individuality lies more in juxtaposition than in synthesis. Der ferne Klang - the distant sound - is a fitting metaphor for Schreker's own struggle to find his voice because it captures something essential about the nature of his search, the quality of his aural experience. More diffident than Schoenberg, he is a composer straining to hear from afar, a detached but empathetic observer, a stenographer of the soul. Schreker's title also evokes his links to Romanticism, although it is Romanticism filtered through turn-of-the-century sensibilities. Schreker is fully cognizant of that crisis of language and authenticity so powerfully formulated by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his Lord Chandos Letter of 1902. In the traditional narrative of Viennese modernism that crisis in language is equated with the crisis of tonality in which the emancipation of dissonance was a courageous recognition of necessary consequence.